So, if you want a VL that looks even prettier AND performs better than the free version go get your Deluxe today.

(emphasis mine)

Is the improved performance due to compilation and/or runtime tweaks to the same applications as the free version? I've been looking at VL 5.9 Light, and will look at VL6 Light; would I get better performance "slimming down" VL6 Deluxe or just using VL6 Light?

I bought the Deluxe download version and stayed up most of the night downloading the ISOs and burning the CDs.

I used the old reliable text installer on my 1.3 GHz Celeron desktop. As expected, everything went smoothly, no problems whatever. I have a partition with VL6RC4 on this computer, so I simply copied over much of my home directory plus things I had installed in /opt and /usr/share, which is a very quick and easy way to be right where I want to be. What took me the most time was moving the multitude of non-Western fonts out of /usr/share/fonts to a /usr/share/moved_fonts directory I created that is not on the font path. I'm glad VL is better internationalized but I DON'T want fonts loaded I'll never use. So I move those somewhere else (thereby uninstalling them) and I also comment out a couple of directories listed in xorg.conf. There are also fonts installed that I simply don't like or that are Type III (but I have a Type 1 version of them in my font collection). I move those to another directory I've set up and if anything complains, I can simply put them back.

I'm sorry to say that I don't like the new wallpaper for 6 Deluxe. No problem--I replaced it with the VL6 matrix wallpaper. I wasn't able to use VASMCC to set some things up because THE FONT IS TOO SMALL! It's too hard on my eyes. So I exited X and ran VASM in the console and was able to actually see what I needed to.

So, if you want a VL that looks even prettier AND performs better than the free version go get your Deluxe today.

(emphasis mine)

Is the improved performance due to compilation and/or runtime tweaks to the same applications as the free version? I've been looking at VL 5.9 Light, and will look at VL6 Light; would I get better performance "slimming down" VL6 Deluxe or just using VL6 Light?

In part, we have selected a different theming method, which seems to be more responsive than that chosen for the free version. There are other tweaks which helped to improve. The applications aren't exactly the same as the free version, although many that you find on the free are also found in the Deluxe. The Deluxe has a whole lot more included. You even get a case sticker, how cool is that!?As for comparing to the Light, there is a completely different approach taken in the light version. For much older , slower systems, you may want the light, as some thing in the STD (free and Deluxe) may not run as well on these systems. As far as I know of, the Light 6.0 is still being completed. So with that , I have not yet been able to compare the STD with Light. I have done my personal comparison of the STD, free and Deluxe, on the same machine back to back.

Dell Dimension 8250 with P4-533MHz FSB, 512 Meg's of RAM (slow stuff), and 20GB ATA-66 HD. The video card is all that I have upgraded, from the original Dell/Nvidia 64Meg card upgraded to a Nvidia 5200-512Meg Ram card

Question - were there any substantive changes to VL6 between RC4 and the final version?

Congratulations to the Vector team on the new release!

Tons Sorry, I don't have a changelog. But there have been numerous changes between the two.

Quote

Masta,

I'm curious about this. Did you all compile the kernel itself differently, say doing something like altering the scheduler, for these various versions?

thanks- H

As far as I know of the kernel is still the same compilation. One thing that we try to do here in VL, is to keep as much usability in the free version as we do in the Deluxe. We do not hinder the free version in any way, like some other distro's are known to do. As for the technical details on what makes it seem to perform better on Deluxe than Free.. well, All I can really tell you about it is that for one thing, even though the graphics are higher quality, they are smaller in file size, this helps a lot. The other thing I've noticed is the theming method that was chosen on XFCE's desktop, it just runs better as in more snapier.

You may get different results than I do on my test machine, but I'm sure those results would show some improvement. I'm just telling my findings. I have been using the free version all throught on that test machine, while it was being built and tested. It has, since Beta stages, ran quite well. When it came time for the Deluxe, I noticed an improvement. I have not done the stop watch timing, nor have I looked at the resource loads or any of that. I just go by what I see and feel. And the test machine is certainly SLOW to me since I have much faster systems that can run circles around it all day long. Anything that makes that thing feel a bit faster, I am sure to point it out.

Great Distro. I had it installed in VirtualBox for a while, but tried the final on a Acer Aspire 1306 last night (had a spare disk). I had to install it twice though, because of the boot flag partitioning the drive. It actually installed my wireless card (in OpenSuse 11.x, I had to install ndiswrapper)Since I'm just a beginner in Linux (have quite some WinXP experience), some no-know improvements:

At some point in the installation process, could you check the boot flag of the partitions?

Could the installer suggest the partitioning of my disk?

I'm looking forward to the LiveCD. It's great demonstrating (vector) linux on a customer's pc.It's easy checking internet availability on a 'broken' pc.

From what I can see, VL6 works great. It's fast, easy (I like the WLAN configuration), clean, GREAT!

What took me the most time was moving the multitude of non-Western fonts out of /usr/share/fonts to a /usr/share/moved_fonts directory I created that is not on the font path. I'm glad VL is better internationalized but I DON'T want fonts loaded I'll never use. So I move those somewhere else (thereby uninstalling them) and I also comment out a couple of directories listed in xorg.conf. There are also fonts installed that I simply don't like or that are Type III (but I have a Type 1 version of them in my font collection). I move those to another directory I've set up and if anything complains, I can simply put them back.

Just FYI, the reason the non-Western fonts have to be loaded initially is so that someone who uses a language other than English gets a usable system at first boot. Let's say you preferred Russian to English. You do the install in Russian (now supported) and choose Russian as your default language at first boot in gdm. Can you imagine what it would look like with no Cyrillic fonts? It would be unusable. Loading the fonts allows VL to "just work" for users around the globe.

There is a way around it used by some other distros that have better internationalization than VL: when the installer language is chosen (and they usually have dozens of choices, not five) those fonts are loaded but not everything. Some installers (think Mandriva, Red Hat) then let you choose additional languages to support from a menu during the install. This allows only the truly needed fonts to be included. Hopefully M0E_lnx and uelsk8s are reading this because that would be a great addition to the next version of the installer Everyone would be happier.

Some of the international fonts also have really nice Latin (English) glyphs. I use Miriam CLM Book Mono as my default terminal font for everything. I will admit I was surprised (shocked, really) when Culmus Fonts became part of the default install. I'm not complaining, though, since I use them anyway.

Anyway, the only app in the repo that looks for specific fonts and will have issues if you don't have them installed is PW, part of SIAG Office. If you don't have that or any apps specifically designed for international use you probably can safely uninstall most any fonts you don't like with gslapt.

My "moving fonts" saga wasn't a complaint that the fonts are installed, just describing what I do to cut down on the number of installed fonts. I appreciate your explanation of why they're there and I certainly wouldn't want non-English speakers to have to learn English just to install VL.

It takes a few minutes to remove the ones I don't want, but it's something I do once and never again. I don't remove the fonts from the system, just move them where the font system won't find them; I have plenty of room.--GrannyGeek

Today I installed VL6 Deluxe on my notebook. I used the text installer, as I prefer it.

No problems at all. I used the proprietary NVidia driver. The best news is that I got my wireless working almost right off the bat. I use fixed IP addresses and my ISP's DNS servers, as well as WPA, so manual setting up is necessary. I set up wlan0 with VASM and I ran VLwifi, but after that I was able to ping my router and get on the Internet. The interesting thing is that I didn't have to do anything for the driver. In the past I had to use ndiswrapper. The wireless chip is a Realtek 8185. lsmod shows that rtl8180 is loaded, so apparently it's working okay now. I haven't rebooted, so I don't know if this setup wil survive a reboot, but gettng it going was the easiest time I've ever had with this wireless chip. I'm using the wireless to send this.

Although I didn't like the looks of the default VL6 Deluxe wallpaper on the Celeron desktop, I do like it on my laptop.

I mean to say ... the Standard free download edition is fantastic, as I expected, and the Deluxe is noticeably faster/has lots of extra goodies/etc. ... so it was no surprise to find out how well it works and how nice it looks.

You people are spoiling me.

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible.

Tom

Logged

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." - Linus Torvalds, April 1991

I installed VL 6 Deluxe on my Athlon 64 X2 desktop. As with the two earlier installations, this one was perfect (text installer).

I used the ATI proprietary driver and at the end of setting up X, I got an error message that something incorrect happened and did I want to edit xorg.conf or run x configuration again. I chose to edit xorg.conf. The driver was listed as radeon and I changed it to fglrx. Then I did startx and XFce came up just fine. My glxgears results would indicate that the fglrx driver is indeed the one that is working.

So now VL6 Deluxe is on my three Linux computers and the fun can begin! Thanks again to the devs and everyone who worked on this.--GrannyGeek